The development of fixed and mobile broadband technologies and more powerful mobile handsets have boosted popular usage of content distribution services on mobile handsets.
Mobile broadcast solutions have been standardized by different organizations, such as the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS). 3GPP multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) enables resource-efficient delivery of multimedia content to the mobile users. A multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) client can receive content via download delivery, streaming delivery, a combination of streaming delivery and download delivery, and/or other delivery methods.
Multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) is a 3GPP Release 6 (Rel-6) feature, which may be deployed by network operators where it is cost efficient to have the broadcast/multicast distribution of content. When multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) subscribers move to other areas, where there is no multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) coverage, the network operator may distribute the multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) content in a unicast mode.
Multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) introduces the concept of a point-to-multipoint service into a 3GPP system. A requirement of a multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) user service is to be able to securely transmit data to a given set of users. In order to achieve this, there needs to be a method of authentication, key distribution and data protection for a multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) user service. This means that multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) security is specified to protect multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) user services, and it is independent on whether multicast or broadcast mode is used. A similar concept is used by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) in their OMA Broadcast specifications.
With the explosive growth of media content consumption, the number of media servers to provide streaming services is required to be increased almost linearly with the number of users. In addition, centralized streaming media servers require considerable demands towards the bandwidth of the backbone IP network. So it is required to deploy more and more edge servers close to user equipments (UE) to guarantee service quality with the increasing number of users.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology can be used between edge servers and user equipments (UE) to relieve the above problem with regard to coverage area and network load. Not only the edge servers handle the requests from its locally served user equipments (UE), but also they can handle the requests transferred from the neighboring edge servers. Similarly, if the user equipment's (UE) capabilities permit, the user equipment (UE) can offer spare uplink bandwidth and storage space while obtaining data, and uploads data to other requested destinations. Content is transmitted in a segmented manner, and most of the traffic can be spread across the edge of the network, which helps reduce the storage and bandwidth demands of centralized servers. Therefore, the system capability is improved along with the increasing number of edge servers and user equipments (UE). To utilize peer-to-peer (P2P) technology efficiently, a proper interaction between the peers is needed. Such interaction can be controlled by the network but a user may have verification for participating in the peer-to-peer (P2P) content distribution.